There’s a lot of comments talking about used and refurbs. I personally use these types to get good deals but I also have a reasonably robust backup protocol. Not a full 321 backup but an appropriate level of risk for my needs.

My point being, if you go that route, they’re cheaper but the odds that one dies on you might be higher. Make sure you manage your backup strategy to a risk value you’re comfortable with.

That said, I’ve also had great experiences with serverpartdeals. I’ve also used diskprices.com to find deals.

Things to consider are noise, temps, power-on time, etc. For myself, temps are fairly consistent in my case and it’s in a closet so I don’t care about noise. I also don’t need particularly fast access on the HDDs (I use an nvme cache strategy as well) so I can pretty much use whatever. Your needs might differ.

Well not sure what was different this time but it fired right up after install.

I didn’t test extensively but the controller support seemed to work reasonably well. I just played through Mos Eisley and nearly got gold even with a little delay on figuring out controls.

There are definitely some tweaks to the control scheme I’ll want to make - it doesn’t follow modern conventions very well (e.g. the fire button isn’t any of the trigger/shoulder buttons). The only issue I noticed is if I accelerated, the camera didnt always keep up. I’m not sure what exactly is causing that. I’ll have to play with settings later to see if I can get it right.

IMO, much better than keyboard though, for my preference anyway.

Unrelated to the controller, it doesn’t want to use the right sound output and I can’t figure out how to control that. In my setup a fairly minor inconvenience. I might be able to figure that out when I get more time to mess with it.

I know I’m a little off-topic but I’ve been trying on and off to get this game to work for years. Are you playing on Windows? I can’t get it to start up properly. Any tips?

If I can get it working, I do have an xbox controller for my PC and would be happy to share my experience!

I tried to avoid Calibre for as long as I could. In my opinion, it’s way too opinionated about how everything is organized. Instead of working with you, the user, it forces you into line with how the developer thinks it should work. The developer is also kind of an ass to his community and, as a dev myself, I have some concerns over some of their choices.

All that said, I finally gave in recently and converted to Calibre because there’s nothing else that works as well. It’s too niche of a space for there to be much competition. To use it remotely - or, more accurately for my use, headless - the docker image I use sets up a VNC viewer to work with the application.

For actually browsing the content that Calibre organizes, I settled on Kavita. There’s no competition for Calibre’s organization but Kavita is easily the best content browser I’ve tried. If you’ve organized and tagged your ebooks with Calibre, it does a great job of making them available on the web and offers an OPDS server as well as the web viewer. I am more into ebooks than comics or manga but I have a few that Kavita also manages well.

Oh! I didn’t know audiobookshelf could do ebooks. It doesn’t look like it has an OPDS server which is my primary use case.

Does it require a particular folder structure? That might explain why I have trouble finding books sometimes. Kavita knows about them but search can’t always find them.